Start making compost! Lots of it. When the leaves start falling and people bag them, get them and bring em home. Go to starbucks and get their used coffee grounds. Hoard that, to layer with the leaves when you start getting them.

Moni

Mike,

Moni gave great advice. Every bag of leaves you can come up with is a huge plus. Some people (and I'm not naming names here) drive around and pick up bags of leaves that folks rake and bag and put curbside for garbage pickup.

Once you have the leaves, you can poke holes in the bags to allow air and rain inside and you can compost them right there in the bags OR you can chop them up with a lawn mower or leaf shredder and add them to a compost pile OR you can chop them/shred them and pile them up right on top of the future site of your veggie garden. If you do the latter, pile them up at least a foot thick, water them with a sprinkler every now and then to keep them moist, and let them sit there all winter. They'll smother the vegetation beneath them, they'll keep weeds from sprouting, and they'll decompose quite a bit by spring--and then you can rototill them into the soil to enrich it.

Some cities also chip and shred tree trimmings into mulch and give it away free to residents. If you live in an area that does that, get all you can and pile it up near your future veggie garden site. You can use it to mulch pathways, or you can let it decompose and add it to beds. If you are in a rural area and have an electric co-op, either they or the tree service they use may be willing to give you their chipped/shredded tree trimmings too.

One important thing to do now is to go ahead and select the spot now that you're going to use for a veggie garden plot in the spring. Once you've done that, study your soil. You can do the old jar test to determine the composition of your soil. (I've linked an article below that describes how to do the jar test and tells you how to interpret the results.) This well help you figure out what percentage of your soil is sand, loam, silt, clay or organic material. The odds are, no matter what kind of soil you have, the main thing it will need is organic material.

Organic material can be added in many ways.....including via the use of compost, peat moss (much inferior to compost but readily available....I don't use it myself), chopped up or shredded leaves, old straw, old hay (beware the weed seeds though), composted animal (cow, chicken, rabbit) manure, pine bark fines, composted cotton burrs, cottonseed meal, etc.

A soil test would be a valuable tool to help you determine in advance if your soil has any major nutritional deficiencies. If it does, people here can tell you what to add to your soil to overcome those deficiencies. However, the truth is that if you add lots of compost, then pretty much any nutritional deficiency you find can be corrected via the compost.

Do your research now and figure out if you are going to have raised beds, or not. How are you going to irrigate, if needed? Sprinklers are commonly used, but put tons of water on leaves and that can lead to TONS of foliar diseases. Soaker hoses and drip irrigation put water into the soil where needed and are more economical, since you won't be losing a lot of water to evaporation the way that you do with sprinklers. If you are going to use raised beds, build them this fall, enrich the soil, and have yourself ready to plant in spring.

Do not wait until spring to begin preparing the soil, because heavy spring rains can prevent you from working the soil....fall preparation is vastly superior.

It all starts with the soil, so start there. However, winter is also a great time to do your research and planning. Figure out what you want to grow and figure out the amount of space needed to carry out your plans. Draw a layout on paper and plan what will go where. Planning ahead helps prevent mistakes.

If you've never composted, it's time to start. NOTHING improves soil like compost.

Watch your land and see how rainfall disperses. Good drainage is very important and you should have good drainage if you have sandy loam, but watch how water runs across the land and drains and make sure.

If you are in a rural to semi-rural area, go ahead now and figure out how you're going to keep all the wildlife out of your garden. Even a 2' or 3' chicken wire fence is better than nothing. Don't assume the critters won't come after your garden, because they will.

Good luck,

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Fine Gardening Article: Jar Soil Test

Compost, great I'll get started.

Any advice on the grass like sticker burrs?

Mike

Keep them mowed down and don't let them go to seed. You will be fighting them for years. I thought I had them licked then this year there back with a vengeance. I did notice that there are less of them where I have clover growing.

Mike,

For sticker burrs, the solution is compost or humus added to the soil. Stickers grow in soil that is low in organic material, which is also soil that tends to be low fertility. It takes time to add enough compost or humus to the soil, but over the years, as the soil gets better and better, you'll have fewer and fewer stickers.

Follow plantermunn's advice to keep them mowed down and don't let them set seed. If, by chance, they set seed (the stickers themselves), then get out there and cut the stickers off and dispose of them before the seed can mature.

You can keep them from sprouting by using a pre-emergent weed-killer, but that can be expensive if you're talking acres. It used to be that corn gluten meal was a pretty good organic pre-emergent--and it still is--but so much corn is going into ethanol production that horticultural corn meal and corn gluten meal are becoming very expensive.

Dry molasses scattered on the soil surface helps encourage biologically active soil and this can help discourage weeds too.

So, when I see stickers pop up someplace, I know that location has little organic material and low fertility, and I target that spot for improvement.

Plantermunn's observation that he has less stickers where he has clover growing is an interesting observation--and my guess would be that this is because clover helps enrich the soil if you mow it and let it remain on the soil surface as a "mulch". Using a mulching mower to cut your grass helps too--the decomposing blades of grass are essentially compost and add humus to the soil.

If you have stickers, you can kill them with a post-emergent weed-killer, either chemical or organic, your choice, but that can get expensive, too.

Stickers can be very persistent and you are unlikely to wipe them out the first year, but if you consistently work at it, one year you'll look around and realize you hardly have any stickers at all anymore.

Dawn

I grow a very large garden in sandy loam, and the secret is compost. The more, the better. With that, and plenty of water, it can give you incredible yields of about everything.

John,

I agree that compost is a garden miracle. That, and animal manure too.....which I just mix into my compost piles.

I have trouble with the "plenty of water" most years because I am in a drought-plagued area of southern OK. Even without plenty of water, though, well-enriched soil produces pretty well.....just not as well as it does when there is water available.

Dawn

Once you have your garden area,I suggest getting a propane garden torch (Atwoods sells them)and burning the soil. This kills the seeds on the top 2" of soil.They do this in Europe for years.

Sandy loam! I grew up gardening in it. Everything mentioned above is right on. Sandy loam has tremendous potential. When I was five my folks bought a house in a development on top of an old apple orchard. The soil was depleted sandy loam. The first year all that would grow was burrs, strawberries and chrysanthemums. But Dad kept composting and mulching. Mulch especially helped. Within a few years I could push a straight spade down, halfway the length of the handle. That garden was super productive.

One thing to consider about deer is where they normally pass through. If you can study the lay of the land and take note trails and obstacles, it can help you to plan where to put a garden. Deer don't like to go into "dead end" places, so if you have a place that is hemmed in, it may be a good place to put a garden. Avoid locations which funnel the deer through. Also, it would be best to fence your garden before you plant it. If the deer don't know what is in there they won't try as hard to get in.

Solid fences will often work, being only 5 or 6' tall, as the deer cannot readily see to the other side. They don't like to jump a fence if they can't see where they'd land.

George
Tahlequah, OK